The cross-country road trip is right up there with apple pie on the list of quintessentially American things. Fitting, then, that the first major photography show at the Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art is The Open Road: Photography and the American Road Trip (27 February-30 May). Organised by the Aperture Foundation in New York, the travelling (natch) exhibition features around 100 images snapped on road trips between 1955 and 2014 by 19 photographers, including Robert Frank, Garry Winogrand, Inge Morath and Lee Friedlander. Crystal Bridges has also enlisted the help of their social media followers to create a special Spotify playlist of road tune favourites, such as The Sonics’ Have Love Will Travel, Iggy Pop’s The Passenger and Tracy Chapman’s Fast Car. The exhibition’s next stop is the Detroit Institute of Arts (17 June-11 September), and the cross-country tour will continue to Amarillo, Texas and St Petersburg, Florida. A National Endowment for the Arts award has supported the show, and Coca-Cola, Stout Executive Search and ConAgra Foods have sponsored the Crystal Bridges leg.
